Sheila Tracy Talks to Ian McDougall

Ian McDougallIan McDougall will tell you that he got his first real job at 50 after being a freelance trombone player all his life! He is currently Professor of Jazz Studies and Trombone at Victoria University in British Columbia, having returned to his roots following a highly successful career spent mostly in Toronto, but with the occasional spell overseas, including Great Britain.

Born in Victoria, Ian was 11 when he started playing trombone with the Victoria Boys Band and although his father was a professional banjoist and guitarist and his mother sang, neither had suggested their son take up an instrument.

"I used to sit in front of the radio and bash away with a couple of spoons on pots and pans and boxes and so forth when there was music on the radio. There was no television of course, at least not for us, at that time, around 1949. A friend of mine had a comet and had joined the Victoria Boys Band and as we played sports together and went to school together I said I was going to join, too. I wanted to play the drums but one of the kids told me "You know you don't play the drums like Buddy Rich, you put a thing around your neck and you walk down the street and go dum de dum de dum." Well that wasn't what I wanted, so I said I'd rather have a trumpet because it was a kind of a flash instrument and in a sense it was the showcase instrument of the big bands. My Dad didn't like that idea and he said something I remember vividly and which I often quote; "Take up the trombone, son, because a good trombone player is never out of work". I quoted that at the ITW in Las Vegas in 1995 and it broke the crowd up for one reason or another, as you can imagine!

"Anyway I did get a trombone and I started playing. My Dad, being a musician, got a book out of the music store and showed me the positions. The first scale in the book was B flat and in about ten minutes I was playing it, thanks to my Dad. I never played in a school band, but I was in the Victoria Boys Band and another youth band whose leader was a partner in a night club in Victoria called the Sirocco and they were short of a trombone player. There was some difficulty, because it was a Union job, and by this time I was only twelve and a half. I did an audition and I didn't do very well on some of the commercial charts but I only had to be told once and I was fine. I got the job, and before I was 13, I was in the Musicians Union and playing 9 'til one, Fridays and Saturdays in a club and I've been doing it ever since! I didn't know what I was going to do after High School. I didn't think about being a professional musician. I had a very fine teacher for about a year when I was 14 and later on I went to University to get some formal training. But mostly I've been a listener and a good observer and a bit of an analyser. As a result, I think I can help students when they have problems with their embouchure - which usually aren't embouchure problems at all; they're just not using any air.

"I was playing club dates (we call them "casuals" over there), one night things, functions and so forth. In those days it was a very common thing for people of 20 or 21 to go to Europe and hang out. If you were Canadian the logical place to come was Britain, because at that time you didn't even need a passport. So in 1960, I decided to get away from it for a while, and I arrived in Southampton with a trombone and 50 bucks."

WarmthA quick look at the job adverts in the Melody Maker had Ian checking out a Mecca Dance Hall in Birmingham, but not liking the look of that, he returned to London and hearing that Johnny Dankworth was forming a new band, called his office. Dankworth happened to be playing Ronnie Scott's at the time with a quintet that included Kenny Wheeler, Dudley Moore, Spike Heatley and Kenny Clare, and it was suggested that the young Canadian might like to sit in on a blues during the last set one night. About a week later, he got a call from the band manager, trombonist Tony Russell, asking him if he'd like to join the band.

"That's how I got in the Dankworth band. I spent almost two years here and had a really great time in England. It was a nice time to be here. Not for some things like food, but the guys in the band were all terrific people and it was fun. On the road in Britain was quite different from being on the road in Canada or the U.S. because you get on a coach here and you go for 75 to 100 miles and you're at your gig. Over there, it might be 700 miles. There were two other Canadians in the band, Kenny Wheeler and Art Ellefson, and we were often referred to as the "Colonials"! I had great experiences with the Dankworth band, we stopped at pubs, we played darts and I had a heck of a good time and met some really terrific people. A couple of years ago, I came over and I hadn't seen Eddie Harvey for 35 years and we struck up a close friendship again. And this week I was in Leeds working with Al Wood at the Leeds College of Music and the lead trumpet player in the band was Dickie Hawdon and he came down and we had a couple of beers - so I see old friends from time to time."

At the time as Ian McDougall was with John Dankworth, Don Lusher decided to leave Ted Heath, and suggested Ian as his replacement; so an audition was arranged at the Paris Cinema in Lower Regent Street.

"I talked to Ted and he asked me if I'd like to join the band and I said "Sure". It was a kind of a good opportunity for me because the Dankworth band wasn't a band you heard about at that time, certainly not in the '50s when I was growing up, but the Heath band was very well known. So this was an opportunity to play with one of the world's great bands. I was with Ted for a very short time. I did a few gigs with them and then I had to make a decision whether I was going to play with John's band or Ted's. John's was a real jazz band on the road. It didn't pay quite as much money as Ted was paying but John was very well organised at that time and we did have pretty steady work and I'd gotten used to the guys and knew them very well. It was a dedicated jazz band, whereas Ted's was a band where some of the solos were jazz solos but it wasn't a dedicated jazz band like John's. So I made my decision to go with John, and I did that until December 1961. Then I got very homesick for the British Columbia mountains, and I went back to Canada and settled in Vancouver. I'd never played "legit" music, but I had an old friend Ted Lazenby who was the first trombone in the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra and he told me there was an opening for second trombone. I said I hadn't done that sort of work before, although I thought I could do it. This was the end of July and the auditions were at the end of August. So we played duets in alto and tenor clef, he showed me how to play some of the excerpts and so forth and I did the audition and got the job. I played my entire symphony career, which lasted three years, on my original 2B King, which nowadays would be unheard of, unless you're using it as an alternative to an alto trombone! I learned how to play that kind of music in terms of interpretation and so forth.

"In the meantime I started working in a terrific nightclub in Vancouver called "The Cave". The great thing about it was every ten days a name act came in. They had everything from a quintet to a big band with strings. It was a tryout place for acts for Las Vegas and at that time in the '60s there were 400 working musicians in Las Vegas. Every night there were 400 people playing instruments. There are about four now! The Cave was on the circuit and was also used by acts breaking in new material. Vancouver couldn't afford them but they were prepared to come up there for what they could get just to get the chance to try things out. We had Tony Bennett, Ella Fitzgerald, the Basie Band. I was actually there when Louis Armstrong came when he was still doing clubs. I sat listening to Louis for a week, a terrific experience. During this period I thought I'd go back to University in case the business went down the tube. I got a Bachelor of Music degree and then went on to get a Masters degree in composition. I never used it until I got this job I have at the University of Victoria. When they said to me "We know you've got all that experience and you're a good teacher, but if you had some academic training, this would help". So I said "Yes, I've got a Masters degree" and they almost fell over with glee! That meant that traditionally I was okay. With all the changes and the playing and sight-reading, I became a better musician. I did the symphonic stuff, I worked in chamber orchestras and I became an all round trombone player. By this time I'd bought a couple of extra bigger bore horns! I met my wife Barbara when she was at the University of British Columbia. She went off to Julliard to take a Diploma there in the middle to late '60s and I stayed in Vancouver. We knew each other at University but we never dated. But when she came back we started dating we got married and now we have three kids.

A Five Star Edition"Vancouver was limited at that time and we decided as a family to move to Toronto, Toronto being the major city for music. Barbara, who plays violin, got in right away with some gigs and it wasn't very long before I was called to do jingles. I sort of became the first-call trombone player in Canada I guess, doing studio work, television, movies and so on. I was writing quite a bit and we settled down and had a lot of fun and a lot of hard work in the music business for fifteen years. Rob McConnell knew about me, because he'd heard me on the radio. So as soon as I got to Toronto in 1973, Rob phoned me up and asked me to do a gig and then asked me if I'd like to join the Boss Brass and I said "Sure" because it was a great band. He'd started it in '68 as a brass band with rhythm section, the idea being to create work for musicians, and then in 1971 he changed it to its present form. By the time I joined, it was starting to get a reputation as a jazz band because although the original Boss Brass played some jazz, Rob decided to go for all out jazz and that was a good idea because, you know, he's quite a unique arranger. I recall that on our first trip to Los Angeles in 1981, Rob was honoured at a special dinner hosted by all the top arrangers as they said they were deeply indebted to him for his innovations in arranging techniques. We didn't play that much during the year, probably 25 days, but because everybody was playing with each other on sessions all day long, you were still playing with the same people and there was a style. And Canadians being Canadians, we got along well and didn't complain a hell of a lot. We were all friends and we got along really well. Rob has put most of his life into that band, including all of his money, which is a very honourable thing to do and he made it work and we had some wonderful times.

"In 1985 things were changing dramatically. With electronics and economics together, I could see the demise of the music business as I knew it and we'd always intended, as West Coasters in Canada, to go back to the West Coast because of the quality of life. I sort of had it in my mind that we'd do it when I was 55, but because of the change in the business we said let's do it just a little bit early. We decided to go to Victoria on spec. We had enough money to buy a house but I had nothing lined up and I could have been selling shoes for that matter!"

Songs & AriasBut he didn't have to. For the first year Ian taught arranging and took the big band at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, which involved a weekly four-hour journey by road and ferry. The following year, the University of Victoria invited him to take their big band and for the next 12 months he coached both university bands until he was invited to apply for his present post.

"One of the major things that's being done in schools these days is using a big band as a tool for music education but we don't have enough qualified people out there. One of the reasons is there's nobody teaching it. So they put some pressure on the music school to start a jazz section. I think it came down to a vote and the vote was 50-50 and the Head of the department, a woman, voted in favour of a jazz musician. I had to apply for it, and this was where the Masters Degree was a great help to me in getting the job. The university job is my meat and potatoes now but I have my Quartet and last fall I took the maximum time off I could from university, and they're very good about that because they want you to keep playing. We came over here with the quartet and spent five days at Cork and then Eddie Harvey got us a gig at the White Horse Club, we did a clinic at St. Albans and had a nice holiday while we were over here! I get phoned up to do clinics in Canada or the USA and we do some of the festivals in Canada in June and July. A guy phoned me from Hawaii in the middle of December and asked me to go to their Arts Festival. He said he didn't have a lot of money but he would give me two tickets, put us up in a nice hotel, rehearse one day, play a couple of concerts and the rest of the week is yours and the holiday's sort of your pay. Sounded pretty nice to me and they put us up in the most beautiful hotel you could possibly imagine. I got booked to go to Salt Lake City with Carl Fontana, Bill Watrous and Al Grey with a local rhythm section and when we got there we sort of winged a few charts and it was like a jazz party with just trombones. That was a lot of fun.

"The Boss Brass didn't work between '86 and '90 because Rob went to LA to teach at the Dick Grove School of Music. When he reformed the band in 1991, he asked me to be his lead trombonist once again. I commuted back to Toronto, some 2,500 miles, for two or three years to do his gigs but then it became difficult spending so much time away from the University. So Alistair Kay, a fine trombonist, took over from me in 1993. However last fall, Rob had a 10-day tour across Canada visiting several universities and as Al couldn't do it, Rob asked me. I had a great time playing with the band again. By the way I've just written Rob a ballad called From McSlide to McValve, Greetings!"

Ian McDougall has twin sons, both of whom have followed him into the music business, studying for their Masters Degree, one on trumpet, the other on trombone. So how does he see the future for young musicians?

"Let's face it; every symphony orchestra in the world is starting to downsize. The young people of today, their ears are tuned to electronic and technical music and they couldn't care less about Mahler or Beethoven or Duke Ellington. They don't care. That's the general public. But there's another section of the public that really does care. So it's a matter of education in our schools. That's the dark side but the bright side is I think human beings will eventually get fed up with this electronic stuff. Maybe I'm pipedreaming but I think eventually the music will start coming back for jazz players with the kind of thing that happened in the '30s and '40s with the jump bands, the swing bands and the blues bands. The only way it will come back is if it becomes a little bit more popular like it was in the '30s, something you could dance to. Cream rises to the top and the odd person is going to become internationally known as a great jazz player - and one of the finest jazz players in the world right now is Mark Nightingale. The first thing I say to young people is that the business doesn't look too good right now but if you want to be an instrumentalist, don't narrow yourselves to any one type of music. If you have to make your living playing in a Broadway or West End show, learn how to play symphonic music as the guys that are getting hired these days are often 'legit' players, so learn how to do that. Then if there's a jazz gig at the weekend you get your kicks from that because you're sure not going to make a lot of money out of the jazz business. Like Phil Woods said when he was asked whether he thought jazz was dead: "No, but it's not feeling too good!"

Standards"I think the problem with the whole music business is the big star, the big show. At the top of the pile you have Wynton Marsalis and people who charge big bucks for their jazz gigs, and then there's all the rest of the musicians who go out for £30 or £40 - and many of them are equally as good as some of these big top money earners. It's just who's got the popularity in this area. The Three Tenors playing to 100,000 people, making a million dollars each, when it should be these guys making a decent living in an opera house somewhere. I don't know, it's a depressing situation but the bright side is I think it will come back. I sure hope so. Here's another point, what do I tell all these young people? I tell them you're getting a really good degree that is going to discipline you to do other things. If you get a degree in jazz studies or symphonic music and you don't necessarily make a living in those areas, if you're practising properly, you're disciplining yourself to become a better person. You can go into another field, but the quality of the training you had as a musician is going to stand you in good stead for the rest of your life. You do have to be disciplined to be a good musician because you have to get in that room by yourself and practise - and if you can do that and you're good at it, you'll end up okay."

Ian plays a King 2B Silversonic with a Joe Marcinkiewicz mouthpiece modelled especially for him. "As trombonists we're all aware that no two mouthpieces are the same even if they're the same model. There was a particular 11C Bach that I liked but I wanted just a slight adjustment, which Joe did, and I've been playing that for ten years. It's called the Ian McDougall model but there's also a Charlie Loper model and so on. My King 2B is one of the anniversary models made in 1993. I started on a 2B and the instrument I had in John Dankworth's band was a 2B which I wished I'd kept. When I went home I got a 3B and didn't like it so I got another 2B. I played a Williams for about two years but then I went back to the 2B again. I really liked a .500 bore horn that I was sent by the King company in 1980 which was between the 2B and 3B and called the 2B Plus - but they stopped making it because it wasn't selling very well. I play a Benge 190 and a Conn 88H for my symphonic work. I like those. A good horn is a good horn; it's the guy or the girl behind it that counts."

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Slide Factory 2007